Thick bars. Click it to switch styles.
Mini spectrum
A tiny spectrum analyser that sits in the corner of your screen and moves to whatever your PC is playing: Spotify, YouTube, games, anything. Click it and it turns into a glowing oscilloscope.
Free and open source. One file for Windows 10 and 11, with nothing to install.
At actual size, it's barely there
It floats above your other windows without getting in the way. Try it on this pretend desktop: drag it around, click it, scroll over it, or right-click it.
- Drag
- Move it anywhere, even onto a second screen.
- Click
- Switch between thick bars, thin bars, a waveform and an oscilloscope.
- Scroll
- Make it bigger or smaller.
- Right-click
- Change fall speed and peak caps, keep it on top, or quit.
Get it running
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Download MiniSpectrum.exe
It's a single file. Put it anywhere you like, such as your desktop.
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Double-click it
If Windows says “Windows protected your PC”, choose More info, then Run anyway. The warning appears because the app isn't signed with a paid certificate.
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Play something
The widget appears in the bottom-right corner and reacts straight away. It remembers where you leave it.
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Close it from its menu
Right-click the widget and choose Quit. It has no close button so it stays out of the way.
Good to know
Does it record my audio?
No. It reads your speaker output as it plays and draws it straight away. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.
What does oscilloscope mode show?
It works like an analogue oscilloscope in X-Y mode: the left channel moves a glowing beam sideways and the right channel moves it up and down. Ordinary music draws shifting, tangled shapes. Search YouTube for “oscilloscope music” and those tracks draw actual pictures. The beam comes in cyan, green, amber, ice or violet, and Scope gain switches between sizing itself to the music and a fixed size, like a volts-per-division knob.
Does turning the volume down shrink it?
No. Windows lowers the volume before the point where the app listens, so it reads the volume slider and undoes it. The display stays the same size at any volume. Untick Ignore Windows volume in the right-click menu if you'd rather watch the real level.
I plugged in headphones and it stopped moving
Right-click it and choose Reconnect audio. It then follows whichever output Windows is using.
Does it work on a Mac or Linux?
No. It relies on a Windows feature called WASAPI loopback to hear what your PC is playing.
My antivirus flagged it
Apps packaged with PyInstaller sometimes trigger false alarms. The full source is on GitHub, and you can run it with Python instead: python -m pip install . in the source folder, then mini-spectrum.
Where are my settings kept?
In .mini_spectrum.json in your user folder. Delete it to reset everything.